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GM’s uServices API and COVESA
General Motors (GM) recently announced a bold move to accelerate transformation — an open API called uServices aimed at developers.
The automotive industry is undergoing a software revolution. Increasingly, cars are defined not just by mechanical parts under the hood, but by the sophistication of their onboard computing systems and connectivity.
Paired with their earlier open-source uProtocol project, GM is pushing to standardize key elements of automotive software. But they aren’t going it alone — uServices has also been submitted to the Connected Vehicle Systems Alliance (COVESA), to bring wider industry adoption.
This article explores what’s driving this shift, and how moves like uServices and COVESA are shaping the future of smart, connected vehicles.
The Rise of the Software-Defined Car
GM’s announcement represents a concerted effort to transition to “software-defined vehicles” (SDVs) — cars whose functionality depends largely on software, not hardware. This enables new features to be continuously added via over-the-air (OTA) updates. It’s a change driven by the success of Tesla, the first automaker to prove the power of OTA updates and introduce improvements via regular…
